The Lost Relic

By Scott Mariani

A SUPER-CHARGED THRILLER FROM THE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR

‘Deadly conspiracies, bone-crunching action and a tormented hero with a heart . . . packs a real punch’ Andy McDermott

A WEB OF DECEIT.
AND BEN HOPE IS CAUGHT UP IN THE MAYHEM…

Whilst visiting a former SAS comrade in Italy, a distracted Ben nearly runs over a young boy – and unwittingly walks into his deadliest mission yet.

Ben’s involvement with the boy’s family runs deeper as he witnesses their brutal murder at a gallery robbery. A seemingly worthless Goya sketch was the principal target in the bloodbath heist. Now it’s up to Ben to find out the truth behind the elusive painting.

Wrongly accused of murder and forced to go on the run, he must get to the heart of the conspiracy while he still has the chance…

The Ben Hope series is a must-read for fans of Dan Brown, Lee Child and Mark Dawson. Join the millions of readers who get breathless with anticipation when the countdown to a new Ben Hope thriller begins…

Whilst the Ben Hope thrillers can be read in any order, this is the sixth book in the series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jan 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9780007342778

Scott Mariani

Scott Mariani is the author of the worldwide-acclaimed action / adventure series featuring maverick ex-SAS hero Ben Hope. Scott’s books have topped the bestseller charts in the UK and beyond. Scott was born in Scotland, studied in Oxford and now lives and writes in rural west Wales.

Book preview

Prologue

Italy

October 1986

The old woman was alone that night, just as she had lived alone in her rambling country house near Cesena for many years. She’d spent the evening in her studio, as she did most evenings, surrounded by her precious paintings and her beautiful things, putting the final touches to a piece of artwork she believed to be the finest she had produced in a long while.

The work that was to be her last.

It was just after ten, and the old woman was thinking about going to bed,when she heard the crash of breaking glass and the six armed men stormed into her home. They grabbed her roughly, forced her down into a chair, held guns to her head. Their leader was a big, burly man with a nose that had been broken more than once. He wore a suit and his greying hair was cropped like a brush.

The last time she had heard an accent like his had been a lifetime ago. She’d been young and beautiful then.

‘Where is it?’ he shouted at her, over and over, with his face so close to hers she could feel the heat of his fury when she said she didn’t know, that she didn’t have it. She’d never had it, never even laid eyes on it.

They let her go then, and she collapsed gasping to the floor. As she lay there shuddering with terror and clutching her racing heart, the six men tore apart her home with a violence she hadn’t seen in all her seventy-eight years.

By the time the men had realised they wouldn’t find what they’d come so far to obtain, the old woman’s heart had given out and she was dead.

What they found instead was a cracked old diary that she had kept close to her for over six decades. The leader of the men flipped hungrily through its pages, running his eye down the faded lines of the old woman’s elegant handwriting.

His long search was only just beginning.

Chapter One

Western Georgia

250 kilometres from the Russian border

The present day

A warm September breeze rippled softly through the conifers in the mountain ravine. The air was sweet with the scent of pine, and the late morning sunlight twinkled off the faraway snowy peaks. The mother lynx had come padding down from the forest to quench her thirst from a stream, keeping a watchful eye on her cubs as they played and wrestled in the long grass by the bank.

As she bent to lap at the cool water, her body went suddenly rigid, her acute senses alerting her to an alien presence. Her tufted ears pricked up at the unrecognisable sound that was coming out of nowhere and rising alarmingly fast. She quickly drew away from the water’s edge while her cubs, sensing their mother’s apprehension, grouped together and scampered behind her.

The terrifying noise was on them in moments, blasting, roaring, filling their ears. The cats bolted for the safety of the forest as two huge black shapes streaked violently overhead, shattering the tranquillity of the ravine. Then, as suddenly as they’d come hurtling over, the monsters were gone.

More dangerous predators than big cats were out hunting today.

Four kilometres across the forest, standing alone on a rocky knoll, was a craggy old stone shack. A century ago, maybe two, it might have been the humble home of a peasant farmer or shepherd. But those days were history, and nobody had lived there for a long time. It had been years since anyone had even set foot in there, until that morning.

It was cool and shady inside the windowless building. The only furnishings within its walls, spaced out in a row and crudely but securely nailed down to the floorboards, were three wooden chairs. The three occupants of the chairs sat quietly, breathing softly, tuned into their shared silence. They knew each other well, but it was some time since they’d all run out of things to say – and in any case there seemed little point in conversation. Even if they’d been able to free themselves from the ropes that bound each of them tightly to his seat, and remove the hoods that their captors had placed over their heads, they knew that the door was heavily chained. Nobody was going anywhere.

So they just waited, each of them alone with his thoughts, in the stillness that comes with true resignation to an irreversible fate. The same kinds of thoughts were running through each of their minds. Wistful thoughts of wives and girlfriends they wouldn’t be seeing again. Memories of good times. Each of them knew that he’d had a good run. It tasted bittersweet now, in retrospect, but they’d all known this time would come round eventually, one way or another. They’d all known who they were dealing with. In the world they’d long ago chosen for themselves, it was just the way things were.

As long as it was over quickly. That was all they could ask for now.

The pair of identical Kamov Ka-50 Black Shark combat helicopters were closing rapidly in on their target. Behind their mirrored visors, the pilots calmly checked their readouts and readied the weapons systems that bristled across the undersides of their aircraft. Two kilometres away, their automatic laser-guided target tracking systems locked in, and a sharp image of the shack appeared simultaneously on the monitors inside each cockpit, enlarged enough to count the links in the chain that was padlocked to the door. The pilots armed their missiles and prepared to fire.

There had been no word from base. That meant the operation was a go.

The pilots hit their triggers, and felt the recoil judder their aircraft as their weapons launched simultaneously. Just under three metres long and weighing forty-five kilos each, the Vikhr anti-tank missiles could travel at six hundred metres a second. The pilots watched them go, hunting down their target with deadly accuracy. Three long seconds as the four white vapour trails snaked and twisted through the blue sky, lancing down towards the trees. They hit in rapid succession, with blinding white flashes as the fragmentation warheads detonated on impact. The shack was instantly blown into pieces of whirling debris.

The pilots closed in on the smashed target and activated their side-mounted 30mm cannons. It was complete overkill, but this was a demonstration and the boss was watching. The boss wanted it to look good, and if the boss said he wanted a show of firepower, he’d get a show. The machine cannons raked and strafed the ground with hammering shellfire. Billowing clouds of dust were churned into whirling spirals by the downdraft of the rotors as the choppers roared over the devastated scene. As the clouds slowly settled, the plot that the shack had once stood on now looked like a ploughed field.

Whatever remained of the three men, come nightfall the wild animals would soon claim it.

Chapter Two

The man watching from behind the black-tinted, bulletproof windows of his Humvee lowered his binoculars and smiled in satisfaction at the climbing wisp of smoke across the valley. His eyes narrowed against the sun, following the line of the choppers as they banked round to head back to their secret base. Back to where they’d be well hidden from their original owners.

The man’s name was Grigori Shikov. They called him ‘the Tsar’. He was seventy-four years old, grizzled and tough. For half a century his business ethos had been based on practicality. He liked things kept simple, and he liked loose ends to be tied up. Three of them had just been tied up permanently. That was what happened to men who tried to conflict with Grigori Shikov’s interests.

Shikov twisted his bulk around to stare at the camcorder operator in the back seat. ‘Did you get that?’

‘Got the whole thing, boss.’

Shikov nodded. His clients were people you didn’t want to disappoint – but not even they could fail to be impressed. He was sure they’d find their own uses for their new toys, once the deal was wrapped and the goods changed hands. The negotiations were in the closing stages. Everything was looking good.

‘OK, let’s go,’ Shikov muttered to his driver. At that moment his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he reached for it. He insisted on having a new phone every few days, but disliked this latest piece of tin. It was too small for his fist and his fingers were clumsy on the tiny keys. He answered the call with a grunt. He rarely spoke on phones: people told him what he needed to hear and he listened. His unnerving way of remaining silent was one of the things he was known for. Like never sleeping. Never blinking. Never hesitating. No regrets and no apologies, never once, in a lifetime spent climbing to the top of the hardest business on the planet, and staying there. Challenged, yes, many times. But never defeated and never caught.

Shikov had been expecting a different call and he was about to hang up impatiently, but he didn’t. The caller was a man named Yuri Maisky, and he was one of Shikov’s closest aides. He also happened to be his nephew, and Shikov kept his family close – or what remained of it since the death of his wife three years earlier.

So he listened to what Maisky had to say, and he felt his heartbeat lurch up a gear as the importance of what he was hearing sank in.

‘You’re sure?’ he rumbled.

It was not a casual question. Maisky knew all too well that the boss didn’t waste words on idle chat. There was a tinge of a quaver in his voice as he replied, ‘Quite sure. Our contact says it will be there, no question. It is definitely the one.’

The old man was silent for several seconds, holding the phone away from his ear as he digested this unexpected news.

It had turned up at last. After all these years waiting, just like that.

Then he spoke again, quietly and calmly. ‘Where is my son?’

‘I don’t know,’ Maisky said after a beat. The truthful answer was that Anatoly’s whereabouts could be narrowed down fairly accurately to any one of three places: he’d either be lounging drunk on the deck of his yacht, gambling away more of his father’s fortune in the casino, or making a pig of himself in the bed of some ambitious hottie somewhere. It was wiser to lie.

Shikov said, ‘Find him. Tell him I have a job for him.’

Chapter Three

Italy

Six days later

Ben Hope glanced at the roughly drawn map clipped to the dashboard and steered the four-wheel-drive in through the gate. The track ahead traced a winding path through the sun-bleached valley. He couldn’t see the house but guessed it must be beyond the rise about a kilometre away.

He’d had a feeling that old Boonzie McCulloch could be trusted to pick a spot that was fairly inaccessible, and was glad he’d had the instinct to hire the sturdy Mitsubishi Shogun for the drive out here. Mid-afternoon, and it was hot enough to need all the windows wound down, even up here in the hill country near Campo Basso. Ben gazed around him at the scenery as the car lurched along the rutted, rocky track.

Beyond a stand of trees, the little farmhouse came into view. It was pretty much exactly what he’d expected, a simple and neat whitewashed block with shutters and a wooden veranda, red terracotta tiles on the roof. Behind the house stood a cluster of well-kept outbuildings, and beyond those was a sweep of fields. Sunlight glittered off a long row of greenhouses in the distance.

Ben pulled up, killed the engine and stepped down from the dusty Shogun. The chickens scratching about the yard parted hurriedly as a Doberman came trotting over to investigate the visitor. From somewhere round the back, Ben heard a woman’s voice call the dog’s name. It paused a second to eye him up, then seemed to decide he wasn’t a threat and went bounding back towards the house.

The front door opened, and a tall man in jeans and a loose-fitting khaki shirt stepped out onto the veranda. His gaze landed on Ben and the moustached face cracked into a grin.

‘Hello, Boonzie,’ Ben said, and he was transported back nearly seventeen years to the day they’d first met. The day a young soldier had turned up at Hereford with over a hundred other hopefuls dreaming of wearing the coveted winged dagger badge of the most elite outfit in the British army. The wiry Glaswegian sergeant had been one of the stern, grim-faced officers whose job it was to put the fledglings through unimaginable hell. By the time the selection process had done its worst and Ben had been one of just eight tired, bruised survivors, his gruff, granite-faced tormentor had become his mentor, and a friend for life. The Scotsman had been there, grinning like a proud father, when Ben had been awarded his badge. And he’d been there, calm and steady and dependable, when Ben had experienced his first serious battle.

They’d served together in the field for three years, before Boonzie had moved on to training recruits full-time. Ben had sorely missed him.

It had been four years after that, Ben now an SAS major stationed in Afghanistan, when he’d heard the unlikely rumours: that mad Scots bastard McCulloch had cracked. Gone soft in the head, found love, quit the army and set up home in the south of Italy, milking goats and growing crops. It had seemed bizarre.

But now, looking around him and seeing his old friend walking down the steps of the house with a warm grin and the sun on his tanned, creased face, Ben understood perfectly what had drawn Boonzie here.

The man hadn’t changed a great deal physically over the years. He had to be fifty-eight or fifty-nine now, a little more grizzled but still as lean and wiry as a junkyard hound, with the same work-toughened look of a man who’d spent most of his life doing things the hard way. Something inside had softened, though. Those hard grey eyes had a diamond twinkle to them now.

‘It’s grand to see ye again, Ben.’ Boonzie was one of those Scots who could go the rest of his life without ever returning to the old country but would go on wearing his accent proudly like a flag until the day he died.

‘You look good, Boonzie. I can see you’re happy here.’

‘You wouldn’t have believed this dour auld fucker could find true bliss, would you?’

‘When did I ever call you a dour old fucker?’

Boonzie’s grin widened an inch. ‘What brings you all the way out here, Ben? You didn’t say much on the phone. Just that you wanted to talk to me about something.’

Ben nodded. He’d wanted this to be face to face. ‘Here, come in out of the sun.’

The house was as simple inside as it was out, but it was homely and inviting. As Boonzie ushered him through to a sitting room, a door opened and Ben turned to see a deeply tanned Italian woman walking into the room. She stood only chest-high to Boonzie, who put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed her affectionately to his side. The smile she flashed at Ben was broad and generous, like her figure. A mass of curly black hair with just a few silver strands tumbled down onto the shoulders of her blouse.

‘This is my wife Mirella,’ Boonzie said, gazing lovingly down at her.

Ben put out his hand. ‘Piacere, Signora.’

‘I am pleased to meet you too,’ Mirella replied in hesitant English. ‘Please call me Mirella. And I must practise my English, as Archibald only speaks Italian to me now that he has learned.’

Archibald! In all the years in the army together, Ben had never asked what his real name was. Ben shot a glance at Boonzie, who was staring in horror at his wife, and couldn’t resist breaking out into a grin that quickly threatened to spill over into a laugh. ‘You and Archibald have a beautiful home,’ he said.

Boonzie soon got over it. While Mirella returned to the kitchen, strictly forbidding any male to enter until dinner was prepared, Ben had a cold bottle of Peroni beer pressed into his hand and was given the tour of the smallholding.

‘Nine acres,’ Boonzie said grandly, sweeping an arm across his land. ‘Place was just a rocky wasteland when I found it. Not what you’d call a farm, but it keeps us going. The greenhouses are for basil, the rest of it is my tomato crop.’

Ben was no farmer. He shrugged and looked blank. ‘Just basil and tomato?’

‘That’s our wee business,’ Boonzie explained. ‘Mirella’s one hell of a cook. Her secret recipes for basil pesto and tomato sauce are like you wouldn’t believe, old son. I grow the stuff, she cooks it all up and we bottle it. Once a week I go out in the van and do the rounds of the local restaurant trade. Campo Basso, the whole area. It’ll never make us millionaires, but look at this place. It’s heaven, man.’

Ben gazed around him and found it hard to disagree. Running his eye across the neat rows of greenhouses, he noticed a gap between them that was just a rectangle of freshly-dug earth marked out with string. A shovel stood propped against a wheelbarrow, beside it a pile of aluminium framing and glass panels wrapped in plastic, some bags of ready-mix cement and a mixer.

‘New greenhouse,’ Boonzie explained, slurping beer. ‘Can’t build enough of the damn things. Need to finish putting it up.’

‘How about I give you a hand right now?’

It took a lot of persuading, but Boonzie finally relented and ran back to the house to fetch another shovel and more beer to keep them cool while they worked. Ben didn’t wait for him. He rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the shovel and dug in.

As the sun rolled by overhead, the greenhouse gradually took shape and Boonzie reminisced about the old days. ‘Remember that time Cole almost shat himself in the boat?’ he smiled as he bolted together a section of frame.

The legendary episode, retold countless times since, had happened during winter training up in Scotland, not long after Ben had joined 22 SAS. He, Boonzie, and two other guys named Cole and Rowson had found themselves stranded in the middle of a misty Highland loch when the outboard motor on their dinghy had cut out. Drifting through impenetrable curtains of fog, Boonzie in his mischievous way had begun working on unnerving the lads with ripping yarns of the strange, terrible creatures that lurked in the depths. As Cole bent over the motor trying to get it started and muttering irritably at Boonzie to shut up, a black shape had suddenly exploded out of the water right in his face, sending Cole into a screaming panic that almost made him fall overboard. The ‘monster’ had turned out to be a seal.

Ben, Boonzie and Rowson, SAS hard guys draped in weapons, trained to kill, had been so weak with laughter that they’d hardly been able to paddle the damn dinghy back to shore.

Those were the stories you carried in your heart. Not like the darker memories, the tales of dead friends, ravaged battle zones, the horror and futility of war. The things nobody reminisced over.

‘So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’ Boonzie asked as Ben poured a fresh load of cement into the barrow. ‘You didn’t come all the way here to shovel shite.’

‘Mirella seems like a lovely lady,’ Ben replied, avoiding the question.

‘Love at first sight, Ben, if ye could believe in such a thing. There I was in Naples. It was only meant to be a weekend away from getting soaked to the bollocks on some fucking God-forsaken hillside somewhere training a bunch of ignorant squaddies. I’m sitting in this wee restaurant sucking up spaghetti like there’s no tomorrow and wondering how the fuck I’d got by on pot noodles and ketchup for all those years, when I hear screams from the kitchen and this guy comes running out like the hounds of hell’re tearing at his arse. Then next thing a saucepan flies out the door after him and almost takes my ear off.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ Ben chuckled.

‘I look up,’ Boonzie went on tenderly, ‘and there’s this fuckin’ apparition standing there in the kitchen doorway, still in her apron. Never seen a woman so wild. And I thought, Boonzie, that’s the one you’ve been looking for. Three days later, we were engaged and I’d put in my resignation. Hitched by the end of the month. I haven’t been back to Blighty since. And I dinnae miss it, either.’

‘I can see that. You picked a perfect spot, Boonzie.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘How did Mirella take to country life after Naples? She doesn’t feel too isolated out here?’

Boonzie used the back of his shovel to spread wet cement over the footings of the greenhouse. ‘When she first saw the place she was a wee bit worried about intruders and the like. Some friends of hers got burgled down in Ríccia.’ He grinned up at Ben, and his eye sparkled. ‘But she’s got no worries with me, Ben. I have my peace of mind, if you know what I mean.’

Ben did. He didn’t need to ask.

‘What about you?’ Boonzie said.

‘Me?’

‘Aye, did you ever settle down?’

‘I lived in Ireland for a while. Live in France now.’

‘What about a woman?’

Ben hesitated. The face that instantly flashed up in his mind’s eye belonged to a woman called Brooke. He held the image there for a long moment, seeing her warm smile, the auburn curls falling across her eyes as she laughed. He could almost smell her perfume, almost feel his hands stroking her skin. ‘Yeah, there’s someone,’ he said, and then went quiet.

Silence for a beat, and then Boonzie asked, ‘So are you going to tell me what you’ve come all this way for?’

‘It’s not important now.’

‘Ben, you’re like a son to me. Don’t force me to beat it out of you with this shovel.’

Ben gave a shrug. ‘OK. I came here to offer you a job.’

Chapter Four

Georgia

Grigori Shikov’s private study was a place few people were allowed to visit. For some it was a privilege; for others a summons to the luxurious boathouse in the villa’s sprawling grounds, escorted by silent men in dark suits, spelled doom.

The dark-panelled room was filled with the treasures Shikov had assiduously collected over forty or more years. The vast antique sideboard behind him was dominated by a magnificent lapis lazuli bust of Frederick the Great. On an eighteenth-century gilt-bronze rococo commode by André-Charles Boulle stood a globe that had once belonged to Adolf Hitler; but it was the extensive collection of artefacts from Imperial Russia, dating between 1721 and 1917, reflecting Shikov’s lifelong passion for what he proudly regarded as his homeland’s golden era, that had earned him the nickname ‘the Tsar’. And it fitted him perfectly.

Of all the historic objects in Shikov’s study, the most physically impressive and intimidating was the immaculate 1910 Maxim water-cooled heavy machine gun, complete with its original wheeled carriage. It occupied the corner of the room, its snout aimed directly towards whomever might be sitting across from him at his massive desk. Between the fixed stare of the machine gun muzzle and the hard glower of the grizzled old mob boss, nobody could fail to be shrivelled to a pulp.

Nobody except Anatoly, Shikov’s only son, who at this moment was lounging in the plush chair as the old man leaned heavily on his desk and outlined the job he wanted done for him.

The third man present at the meeting was Yuri Maisky, Shikov’s nephew. He stood by the desk with his hands clasped behind his back, keeping quiet as his uncle did the talking. Forty-seven years old, small and wiry, Maisky secretly attributed his thinning hair and the deep worry lines on his brow to the strain of working for Shikov’s organisation for most of his adult life. He loved his uncle, but he also feared him.

There weren’t many men whom Maisky feared more than his boss. One was the boss’s son. When the old man looked at Anatoly all he saw was his beloved only child, his pride and joy; Maisky saw a thirty-four-year-old psychopath with a blond ponytail. The face was long and lean and chiselled, the eyes were quick and dangerous. Maisky’s belief that Anatoly Shikov was clinically insane was one he kept closely to himself.

Shikov could sense the tension emanating from his nephew. He knew that most of his associates and employees lived in dread and loathing of Anatoly. That just made him prouder of his only child, although he would never have shown it. Outwardly, he acted gruff and commanding.

‘Are you paying attention?’ Shikov snapped at Anatoly, interrupting himself.

‘Sure.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Of course not,’ Anatoly lied. The Tsar abhorred alcohol. Anatoly did not. He shifted in the chair and glanced down to admire the hand-tooled perfection of his latest purchase, the alligator-skin boots he’d been trying to show off all day by turning up the legs of his Armani jeans. But not even Anatoly would have dared to put his feet up on the old man’s desk. ‘I’m listening. Go on.’

Anatoly had done plenty of jobs for his father, and it was something he enjoyed being called upon to do. Most guys he’d known who had worked for their dads had to go to the office, wear a suit and tie, attend meetings and conferences, sell shit of one kind or another. Not him. He felt highly privileged to be a valued member of the family firm. He and his old buddy Spartak Gourko had once kept a snitch alive for seventeen days under hard torture to extract a list of names of traitors in their organisation. Another time, Anatoly had spread-eagled a man between four posts in the ground, chains around his wrists and ankles, and lit a cigarette as Gourko drove a pickaxe through the guy’s sternum. When old Spartak got going, he was something to behold.

Anatoly enjoyed his work. He never asked questions about his father’s business, partly because you just didn’t ask the Tsar questions about his business, and partly because Anatoly didn’t really give a damn why things got done the way they did. The only questions he generally asked in life were ‘Can I own it?’; ‘Can I fuck it?’; ‘Can I kill it?’. If the answer to any of the above was negative, he quickly lost interest.

This new job sounded like fun, though.

‘Our sources tell us that the piece of artwork in question will definitely be part of the exhibition,’ Maisky said.

‘And I want it,’ Shikov finished in his gravel voice. ‘I will have it.’

The sheaf of papers spread out across the desk was the report on the gallery’s security system, put together by one of the many experts on Shikov’s payroll, a usefully corruptible Moscow security tech engineer who had leaned on contacts in Milan to get the information they needed. The seventeen-page document contained the technical data on the bespoke alarm system recently installed into the gallery building whose photographs, taken with a powerful telephoto lens from a variety of angles just days before, were clipped together in a file next to the report.

Anatoly hadn’t heard the old man doing this much talking in years. Half-listening as his father went on, he flicked through the series of photos. The location in Italy was printed at the bottom. He could see that the gallery was an extension of a much older building. The kind of new-fangled architecture that appealed to arty types. It had only just been built; in the pictures that showed the rear of the gallery, he could see that the groundworks weren’t fully finished, with patches of freshly-dug earth and a half-built ornamental fountain. There was a works van present in two of the pictures, a slightly battered Mercedes with the company name SERVIZI GIARDINIERI ROSSI just about visible on the side.

Italy, Anatoly thought. That was cool. He’d never been there before, but currently had two Ferraris, one red, one white, and most of his wardrobe came from there as well. He even spoke a bit of the language, mostly aped from the Godfather movies. Girls loved it. Yes, Italy was fine by him. Anatoly could appreciate art, too, as long as it involved depictions of naked female flesh.

Sadly, the item his father seemed so desperate to acquire depicted nothing of the sort. Anatoly glanced at the glossy blow-up taken from the exhibition brochure. Just some colourless drawing of a guy on his knees praying. Who would desire such a thing? Obviously it was worth some serious cash, strange though that might seem.

‘You’re not listening to me, boy.’

‘You were saying the alarm system’s a bastard.’

Maisky cleared his throat and cut in politely. ‘That’s putting it mildly. The perimeter protection system is state of the art. If you can get through it, the building is filled with cameras watching from every possible vantage point. The inside of the gallery itself is scanned constantly by photo-infrared motion sensors that could pick up a cockroach. The whole thing is automated, and the only way to override it is to enter a set of passcodes that are kept under lock and key in three separate locations. You need all three to disable the system. Furthermore, the passcodes are randomly re generated each day by computer, in staggered intervals so that the combination’s constantly changing. Any breach of the system will trigger the alarms as well as sending an instant signal to the police.’

‘Seems impossible,’ Anatoly ventured.

‘Nothing is impossible, boy.’ Shikov snatched a printed sheet from his desk and flipped it over.

Anatoly picked it up. There were three names on the sheet, all Italian, all unknown to him. De Crescenzo, Corsini, Silvestri. Beside each name was an address and a thumbnail picture. De Crescenzo was a gaunt-looking man with thinning black hair. Corsini was round and fat. Silvestri looked like a preening popinjay, a man in love with himself even when he didn’t know his picture was being taken. ‘Who are they?’

‘The three men who hold the passcodes,’ Maisky told him.

‘Now here’s the plan,’ Shikov said. ‘Tomorrow evening is the inaugural opening of the gallery. Invitation only, some local VIPs and art critics, people like that, about thirty-five in all. All three passcode holders will be present. Your team will be waiting as they leave, and follow them home. At 3 a.m., you’ll snatch them simultaneously from their homes, bring them back to the gallery and make them enter the codes. How you do it is up to you, but you keep them alive.’

‘Right. And then we go in and grab what we came for.’

Maisky had been waiting for the first sign that the hotheaded young punk was going to handle this in his usual reckless way. Here we go, he thought.

‘It’s not that simple,’ he said. ‘Because the only time the owners might have to override the alarm system would be an emergency situation such as a fire, earthquake or other potential threat to the valuable contents of the gallery, the system’s designers built in a function that will send an automatic alert to the police should the override codes be entered. That function is hard-wired into the system and can’t be disabled remotely in any way. It uses a broadband frequency via the optic fibre landline, with cellular backup in the event that the main lines are down. So it’s essential that before you go in, you ensure that the landline is chopped. And that you use this.’ He pointed at a device sitting on a side table. Anatoly had been eyeing it, wondering what it was. A plain black box, about twelve inches long, wired up to four patch antennas.

‘It’s an 18-watt ultra-high power digital cellphone jammer,’ Maisky explained. ‘It will work in all countries and block the signal from any type of phone, including 3G, over a radius of 120 metres. With this in place, the police won’t have a clue what’s going on.’

‘And if any of the owners decides to get smart and punch in a duress signal that could trip the silent alarm, they’re wasting their time,’ Shikov added.

‘So then I can pop them.’

‘Not until you have the item safely in your possession,’ Maisky said as patiently as he could. ‘Once you’re in, you have to take care of the secondary system as well. Each painting is rigged so that any attempt to remove it from the wall will set off a separate alarm.’

‘So what? If the phones are down—’

‘It also fires the automatic shutter system. A sensitive electronic trigger is hooked up to a hydraulic ram system that will slam shutters down to protect the artwork. The shutters will resist attack from bullets, blowtorches, and cutting blades. They will also automatically block every possible exit and imprison the intruder like a trapped rat until the police come and take them away. And there’s no override code for that. It can’t be reversed.’

‘Are you following all of this, Anatoly?’ Shikov said, watching his son closely from across the desk.

Anatoly shrugged, as if to say all this kind of stuff was child’s play to him.

‘Good. Go and assemble four of your best men. I’m thinking of Turchin, Rykov, Petrovich—’

‘And Gourko,’ Anatoly cut in.

Oh no, Maisky thought, his heart going icy. Not Gourko. Anatoly’s closest crony, the scarred bastard who’d been dishonourably drummed out of the Russian army’s Spetsnaz GRU Special Forces unit for beating one of his officers half to death with a rifle butt. The kind of gangster who gave gangsters a bad name, and one of the few other people who frightened Maisky even more than his boss.

‘You have two hours,’ Shikov said. ‘And then you’re on your way to Italy. You’ll rendezvous with our friends on the ground.’

‘How many in the team?’

‘Ten. Eight men inside, two on the outside.’

Anatoly nodded. ‘Hardware?’

‘Everything you need.’

Anatoly smiled. He could trust his father to be thorough on that score.

When Anatoly had left the room a few minutes afterwards, Shikov gathered up the scattered paperwork and slid it into a drawer. It would be burned later. Maisky circled the desk, frowning. His head was full of things he wanted to say. Things like, ‘Are you so sure you can trust Anatoly with this? He’s wild and irresponsible and his friends are all maniacs, especially Spartak Gourko. How can you be so blind, uncle?’ But he had the good sense to say nothing at all.

Yuri Maisky wasn’t the only one keeping his thoughts to himself. As Anatoly walked away from the